Romper week @ Sewing Mama RaeAnna

Today my playsuit is the main topic on Sewing Mama RaeAnna! A couple of weeks ago RaeAnna invited me to participate in the Romper Week Series and I am soooo honoured to participate in my very first series!

 

Of course I just felt the need to draw my own free pattern for this series and to be honest I like challenges like these! Thanks to Rae Anna I made this free pattern and it turned out to be my most popular one until now. So I’m so glad she pushed me into this direction because other wise I would have probably completely missed the romper trend. So if this romper is new to any one: you can just request the free pattern HERE.

 

But I prefer not to show my version of the playsuit anymore, because that would become rather boring! We’ve seen that one enough I guess. So first of all I would like to share a very cute version of my playsuit made by Sarah from Khadetjes! Secondly I’ll show you how you can turn this playsuit into a circular skirt dress in a very easy way. 

 

So first let’s go to Sarah’s playsuit: For little Hade she has chosen a really funny fish bowl fabric from Robert Kaufman. What a great job to match the fishbowls perfectly! Maybe it’s an idea to write a tutorial how to do this one day…

 

Sarah changed my pattern a little bit. She added a second pocket to the playsuit, but didn’t accentuate it with some extra bias tape. Just a perfect way to add a second pocket in a very subtile way. 

To finish the bottom hem Sarah made this very cute little waves! Why don’t I have a wave stitch on mine? 

 

 

Great job Sarah, I really love your playsuit!

Now secondly let’s have a look at a very small tutorial I wanted to share with you for a long time already. It explains how you turn my playsuit into a circular skirt dress! It’s a very basic tutorial and it does include some mathematics, but I’m sure you’ll understand it! Because I didn’t had the time anymore to make my own dress version from this playsuit, I’ll just show some small drawings to explain you how to do this… 

 

Do you still remember how to calculate the circumference of a circle? That’s everything we need to do! We just have to match the width of the body part with the width of the skirt part. For example: the bodice width at the bottom is 28,52cm for the 1YO size. This means the total circumference of the bodice part is 28,52cm x 2 = 57,04cm.

Now let’s calculate the radius to draw the circular skirt from this:

 

Circumference = pi x diamater  OR   circumference = pi x 2 x radius 

 

So for the 1YO size this means we can calculate the radius like this:

 

Circumference / pi / 2 = radius   OR  57,04cm / 3,1415 / 2 = 9,07cm

 

I hope this is not Chinese to you?

 

 

Now let’s show you how to draw a basic circular skirt with this information. Just one more measurement is missing and that’s the skirt length you like. So just take a skirt that fit’s well of measure the waist knee length of your little girl. 

 

The A – B length is the radius we just calculated. = 9,07cm for the 1YO size.

The B – C length is the skirt length = the waist – knee measurement = 28cm for the 1YO size. 

 

The only thing you need to do is draw two circles with A as a centre point and done! Easy, no!?

 

If you like to add the asymmetrical pocket, you can just add one at the right side. Just be sure that the distance of the right side to the bias tape is the same for the bodice and skirt part.

 

If you don’t add a pocket, you can cut the skirt on the fold line, other wise be sure to add 1cm seam allowance at the top. You’ll also need to add some seam allowance for the hem! 

 

Hope you like this basic mini tutorial? If you’re not into mathematics and like to make a playsuit-dress-version, I can always make a chart with the basic measurements… Just let me know!

I would like to thanks RaeAnna again for hosting the romper week series! Make sure to visit her blog because she is giving away 3 E&E patterns, has a great link party with (of course) only rompers and she has set up a Flickrgroup with lots a nice romper inspiration!